What Pythagorean Illuminism (PI) Means to Me
So far in this blog series I've never really talked about the why of PI -- why I find it such a rich catalyst for new ideas, why I find it so mind expanding, why it's so entertaining to read. Instead, I've mostly talked about the how and the what -- how it's like a Linux distribution, what was my path to discovering it etc.Recently, I was reviewing one of my old ideas notebook, in particular the one I was writing at the time when I was finishing up the God Series and experiencing a mini-enlightenment on PI: a period of about two weeks where I was writing down thoughts and insights at a rate of about 10x my usual rate. In there I found a section I titled "What PI means to me", where I listed all the things I felt I had learned from reading the God Series. After you learn something, you have a tendency to "normalize" on it, and take it for granted: you forget how thrilling it was when you first learned it. In reviewing these notes, that's what it reminded me of, the feeling I had when I first grasped some of these ideas.
Anyways, I thought it made a good summary of what I learned from PI, and also conveyed a sense of what it was like to truly understand them for the first time. So I'm posting that section here, in the order I originally wrote them and largely unedited, in the hopes that it might convey some of the why of PI.
PI enlightenment is simply becoming aware of and understanding and getting the following:
- There is a noumena.
- The noumena is primary.
- The noumena is all there is. The phenomena is an illusion or interpretation of the noumena.
- Idealism is reality not materialism.
- You need to develop rational eyes and ears to sense the ideal world ("eyes to see, ears to hear. what the others did not"), allowing you to see, among other things, the rational unobservables of the world.
- It's basically accepting idealism and being able to think rationally.
- It's the move from the material world to the Platonic world.
- It's Accepting the Platonic world as primary and developing new senses for your new context: rational tools, not sensing or emotional tools.
- you need to develop your rational toolbox : Aristotalean Logic, Fuzzy logic, intuition, insight, analysis, mythos (in a controlled fashion), logos, math, empiricism etc.
- This is like getting ultraviolet and microwave telescopes to see beyond your current range of vision.
- To find and explore the other half of reality, that completes you, unalienates you, and accepts the truths that it presents, like the presence of a soul.
- It's also about destruction:
- Ditching mythos esp. Abrahamic religions.
- Ditching materialism as primary.
- Ditching materialism as having any reality at all (although it still is "virtually" real and useful)
- Realizing that science, while extremely useful and powerful, has limitations, and cannot scale to a full Theory of Everything.
- It's about deconstructing your current material and sensing based world in favor of an idealist, rational world.
- It's about dieing symbolic deaths, to get you ready for your physical death, even as you realize your spirit is eternal.
- It's not about:
- meritocracy (at least for me. I reject this dangerous ideology 100%. Maybe in a Star Trek type of economy, but even then only maybe).
- blindly accepting everything PI teaches.
- satanism, or any sort of weird "magik" system like from Alister Crowley.
- a strange cult like Heaven's gate or Jim Jones "drink the kool-aid" insanity.
- It's about moving from mega to meta:
- physics to metaphysics
- It's a paradigm shift analogous to switching from OOP (Object-oriented Programming) to FP (Functional Programming).
- It's about moving into a new layer: the layer above your current layer.
- It's about expanding your horizons.
- It's about thinking for yourself and becoming "the authority of your own life" a la Joseph Campbell.
- It's about being aware of the real VR (materialism), as opposed to the more commonly understood computer-generated VR.
- It's about learning new vocabulary and ideas.
- It's about exploring new space: knowledge engineering and philosophy as spanning vectors to reach new points in abstract idea space.
- It's about asking the right questions and getting the right answers to those questions.
- It doesn't need to be, but it practically requires:
- Reading and reviewing the entire God Series.
- Reading and reviewing the Michael Faust books.
- The authors would say, but I wouldn't, it's about becoming God.
- It's about becoming mature in a Joseph Campbell sense: "being the authority of your own life".
- It's about returning to the place where you started and knowing it for the first time a la T.S. Eliot.
- It's knowing about and understanding zinfinity (that zero and infinity are duals -- two sides of the same coin).
- It's about swapping out your prior assumptions and only accepting those that are rational.
- Even with the prior beliefs that do pass muster, it will now be because you've thought about them and accepted them, not merely because you were imprinted with them from your parents or society.
- It's about filling in your blind spots of awareness with a rational view and removing any junk-food shims you might have placed there previously.
- It's about nourishing your soul with healthy, sustainable nutrition in the form of rational knowledge and Mathematics.
- It's about restoring balance.
- It's about achieving platonic world gnosis.
- It's about discovering the location of your holy grail (in idea space or elsewhere) ,doing whatever it takes to get there, and walking through the door with the full realization that it's the initial insight about the holy grail and the journey to get there that is the holy grail, and that walking through the door is a mere formality (and yet, paradoxically, an essential step) in order to achieve gnosis.
- It's the realization that there are multiple enlightenments to be had and not just one big enlightenment (there are multiple "an" enlightenments, not merely one "the" enlightenment)
- It's about having your own miniature big bang -- a symmetry break into another phase of existence.
- It's about being amphibious -- gaining stereoscopic vision by being multi-modal: materialistic and idealistic, rational and empirical, mathematical and scientific. PI may not advocate materialism, empiricism, and science, but you can still choose to utilize them if it gives you insight. You gain a new way of thinking in addition to your prior knowledge.
- You become like a snake molting its skin: shedding your former straight jacket to gain a new more flexible exoskeleton.
- It's about doubling down on language, especially meta-language, to try to get back to the original unified state before language and consciousness, and especially self-consciousness fractured our world-view. You want to get back to whence you came and know it for the first time, not by trying to turn your mind off a la Buddhism or returning to a womb state, but by utilizing your faculties and exploiting the sharp edge of language and Mathematics.
- It's about asking questions that you've never asked before, that you didn't even know existed, or that you couldn't even conceive of before.
- Knowledge enlightens about the past.
- Questions enlighten about the future -- where you are going.
- It's about challenging your assumptions and axioms: discovering that you actually have them in the first place, and what they are.
- It's about acquiring a cultural and universal perspective in addition to a personal perspective.
- It's about tweaking your formal system or model of life.
- It's about increasing your anti-fragility.
- It's about understanding what it means to be a Meyer-Briggs INT and accepting yourself and being proud of your personality type for the first time.
- It's realizing that if you understand nothing then you understand everything and if you understand everything then you understand nothing.
- It's understanding that the universe is basically a tautology of 0 = 0.
This was a very good post but I have to comment on one thing. Point 14 you said that it's not about any sort of weird system of magick like Aleister Crowley. I don't know how you came to that conclusion but that is certainly false. It's true that their website and their books don't openly explain any techniques on magick but they certainly hint that the mystery degrees of the Illuminati are all about magick. The most illuistrious grand master of the Illuminati is Simon Magus which is very revealing. The many illuminists that they have named on their website points to the fact that the Pythagorean Illuminati are occultists more than anything else. It's funny that you even named Alesiter Crowley. Somewhere on their website they even promoted Crowley by saying how they have no problem recommending his work. It's pretty hard to think of this group as not about magick when they recommend Crowley's work.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry I missed your post (oh, by about a year). This is my "anonymous" blog, so I really only check in when I'm getting ready to do a new post, which can obviously be a while.
ReplyDeleteYes, I think you're probably right. My only defense, would be that this post is about "PI" (which now seems to more commonly go by Ontological Mathematics [OM]) as *I see it*, i.e. the parts I like, and in the context of my relatively limited knowledge thereof.
But, yeah they do have a lot of what I would consider "legacy" beliefs. I mean the whole story of Simon Magus to me is ludicrous and a silly fairy tale. I know almost nothing about Magick, and Alister Crowley, who I basically considered a drug-addled loon, at least in his later years (although I think when he was younger he actually had some good ideas, and I'm open to any good ideas.. Pythagoras Illuminatus did a good video about the meaning of "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law").
To the extent I get any feedback at all, it's usually about my stance toward Meritocracy that the community doesn't seem to like (Meritocracy to me is itself anti-meritocratic -- let's give all the power and all the guns to a tiny elite minority: what could possibly go wrong there?)
For instance, they used to go on a lot about a "soul camera", which they finally admit in one of their fictional books is actually a Kirlian camera (or kirlian photography), which is what I always suspected. This type of camera has been debunked for decades as not having any sort of meaningful use. These are all part of what I call the "crap apps" in my post on "PI as a linux distribution".
However, I come to praise OM, not bury it. This post was supposed to my positive, let the love flow expression of support.
Indeed, they probably are more occultist than they let on. One of the goals of my blog is to show you're free to pick the parts of OM you like in service of your own personal weltanschauung. I'm certainly not an occultist, nor does it particularly appeal to me. So to me occultism is not a part of *my* Ontological Mathematics. And if that makes me an "ignavi" (the worst possible insult you can levy in OM), then damn the torpedos.
But still, I love these guys. I sometimes wish they would chill out on all the rigidity, but that's for another post.
I would like to add to my last comment, that while I concede that OM has occult elements, I absolutely believe that at its core it's a purely rationalist philosophy. The occultist elements are on the fringes and not essential to its core philosophy in my opinion.
ReplyDeleteA major problem is that most occultists are less interested into working on their spiritual development and instead focus on their development of certain abilities, such as clairvoyance (one of the five higher senses). This is why occultists like Aleister Crowley never appealed to me despite his pretty creative and genius magickal works he provided and that I deem very useful in "higher magick".
DeleteI may probably not be able to convince you on this matter, but I recommend taking a read into Franz Bardon's 1st book: "Initiation into Hermetics". He's one of the very few occult authors that I would call serious (this is evidented by the fact that, unlike many other occult authors, he actually starts at the very basics and not with the stuff that's actually reserved for advanced magickans + I can personally confirm that his practices actually work if you genuinely work through the book) and I personally would say that, as a computer scientist and mathematician, his descriptions go very nicely along my "weltanschauung".
A problem with most other occult authors is that they never start at the basics. They often start with sigil magick, evocation and similar. This is stuff that a beginner in magickal practices is never (except if he's very gifted) going to accomplish at all due to the fact that he lacks the basics, such like the training of the five higher senses, control of the four elements (not to be confused with the physical phenomena that have the same name), etc. This is like trying to teach Topology or Linear Algebra to elementary schoolers. This is why Franz Bardon is exceptional and special, because he actually was genuinely interested into the spiritual development of their students rather than doing the cool stuff first.
It might be fate that I stumbled upon this blog by accident. I do not know. But I think one does positively profit from magickal practices as they allow to enter noumena (or "thing in itself") not from an intellectual only (as Kant stated once), but also to actually experience it. Ancient teachings call this "essential meaning". And the essential meaning usually is not sequential, but non-sequential and can hardly be put into words. Rawn Clark, a fellow and experienced student of hermetics, made a very insightful description of the experience of the "essential meaning" of a thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjYApth-GcM
Regarding the higher senses (astral senses) which are the main components for the perception of the essential meaning of a thing is described by Rawn Clark elegantly in this way: "The astral senses are difficult to describe. They are more than their physical corollaries. For example, the astral corollary of sight, clairvoyance, is essentially visual yet it provides the clairvoyant more than just visual information. When the clairvoyant observes a thing with their astral sight, certain information about the thing is revealed at an almost intuitive level. The clairvoyant will perceive the thing's essential nature along with its current motivation or 'raison d' etre'. Ultimately, this normally passive sense can lead to an active form of two-way communication." (source: abardoncompanion.de)